Oh that’s just awesome! Love it 
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Ok, let’s revive this thread shall we?
I’ll tell one of the more fun stories from my time in the military. Not as spectacular as some other stories here, but I’d like to contribute.
This is the story how an Uzi ruined my marksman badge.
It was near the beginning of this millenium, and I had been in the German Army for around six months.
I had a good amount of shooting under my belt already and I was decent at it. So I decided to go and try getting the marksman badge, called “Schützenschnur” in German:
This varies a bit, but in my case to get it I had to achieve very good scores with three categories of weapons:
- rifle
- light weapon (pistol or submachine gun)
- heavy weapon (machine gun or anti tank weapon)
I had already shot a gold result (no errors) with the G36 rifle. I really liked that weapon.
For the heavy weapon I chose the MG3 heavy machine gun and also managed to get the gold result.
I also had shot a decent result with the pistol, but it was only silver, and I wanted that gold.
Sadly I had been sick during the last shooting exercise so I had missed another opportunity to get the gold.
But there was still one more opportunity near the end of the year. I volunteered for being part of the crew for a light weapons shooting exercise, because usually that would guarantee that I would get to shoot after the rest of the soldiers had left.
There was always a bit of ammo left and we had the habit of not sending opened ammo crates back to the depot. Instead the crew (the supervisor, the clerk, the ammo dispenser and two to three guards) would just shoot a few times, using up the ammo until only sealed crates remained, which then were brought back to the depot. That usually meant that you got one more try than the soldiers that lined up to shoot the exercise.
The Master Sergeant knew that I was reliable, so he agreed that I should be the clerk.
It is a miserable job. You sit there in the cold all day, recording the name and rank of everyone, how much ammo they got, which exercise they shot, and which result they achieved. If you make a mistake then you have to strike it through and write a correction line, and the supervisor has to sign it. It sucks, but I was pretty good at it.
So there I sat, almost freezing to death, writing the shooting journal.
After a few hours I questioned my decision, because it was hard to stay warm. And y’all probably know how great you shoot when your hands are cold. But I was determined to make it.
Finally the last soldiers had finished and left. It was time for the crew to shoot.
The exercise of the day was shooting with the submachine gun MP2A1, which is the German name for the good old Uzi. An iconic weapon. Not a lot of moving parts so it is easy to maintain, it fires the same ammo as the P8 pistol (9mm), and it is cheap.
The thing is: It kinda sucks. It doesn’t exactly shoot straight, at more than 50 yards its dispersion gets horrible, and it is a relatively unsafe weapon.
It has two safety mechanisms (a regular safety lever and a grip safety) but… especially the older, worn out Uzis are known to occasionally shoot when dropped.
It also has the quirk that it may still shoot automatic mode despite being in single fire position. However there’s said to be a trick: Instead of switching the lever from safe to single mode you can put it all the way to auto and then back to single. For some weird mechanical reason that makes it less likely to stay in automatic mode. To this day I don’t know if that is actually true, but we were superstitious so we always did it that way. Everyone had heard of malfunctioning Uzis shooting their whole magazine somewhere without any user input.
I knew all that of course. I had shot the Uzi before, and with decent results. No gold however.
When it was my turn I took the Uzi. The exercise was relatively easy. There were man-sized pop-up targets around 50 yards away. They would pop up, and you had a bit more than a second to shoot them. There were five of them and you had five shots in the magazine.
I made sure to put it into single fire mode the good way when I was cleared to do so.
The first target popped up. BANG! Hit. (Whew, just one shot)
The second one. BANG! Hit. (It felt good, I was lucky it seems)
The third one. BANG! Hit. (This is going somewhere. Two left)
The fourth one. BA-BANG! Hit. But… DAMMIT THOSE WERE TWO BULLETS!
I stared at the (now safe because empty) weapon in disbelief, while the supervisor dryly remarked “that was the first today”.
I had the silver, but for gold I would need all five.
I walked back to the line. That’s when I noticed that there was only a handful of rounds left.
The other guys shot, and when they were through the remaining number of rounds in the crate was… four.
Four. There was a single shot missing.
The supervisor apologized to me. “That was bad luck” he said. Yeah. Yeah it was.
At that moment I was not too concerned, because I was pretty sure that I would get the opportunity to shoot both the pistol and the Uzi again in January.
Later that day when we returned the weapons I told a buddy of mine who was working in the armory about my bad luck. That’s when I learned that in order to get the marksman badge you had to shoot all the weapons within one calender year. It was December.
So I had the silver badge secure, but the gold was likely impossible. It was depressing.
Since I was hoping to extend my service for a few months I was sure that I would get another opportunity though. I shot both the G36 and the Uzi in January and got gold. But the opportunity to shoot the MG3 again never came because there were budget cuts and my extension was denied in march. I left the Army in April without going to the machine gun range again.
And that is how the Uzi ruined my golden marksman badge.
I got me the silver one, and it is a nice souvenir. But to this day I am kinda angry that I didn’t get the gold one.
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Well told! I feel sorry for you for something that happened 20 years ago! 
(Laughing with you, not at you!)
I always thought it strange that the country that manufactured the finest submachinegun in the world (MP5) adopted the Uzi for general issue. Off the top of my head, that’s the only foreign small arm I can think of that the Bundeswehr used for very long. I think the FN-FAL was only a few years, right?
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I think the MP5 was used by special forces, but it is a bit larger and heavier than the Uzi, that’s probably the reason why the Uzi was used.
Here is a list of the weapons of the Bundeswehr (German wiki)
I only shot these:
- P8
- MP2A1
- G36
- MG3
- Granatpistole 40mm
- Panzerfaust 3
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Oh man what a gyp! No Schützenschnur for you buddy! Dang.
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Well, I did get the silver one! 
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Can confirm, having shot them a couple of times; my next door neighbor who was a nuke ELT on the Trepang brought back a bunch of weaponry when they pulled into Haifa, including an Uzi (his father in law was a very, very big mucky-muck in Atlanta at that time, which I guess is how he imported them). I…was not impressed.
@Aginor I too feel a bit angry for you on that one- talk about being robbed!
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I always assumed it was cost, figuring the Uzi was cheaper since it wasn’t blessed by H&K. Both are fairly heavy for what they are, but the MP5 is sooo smooth, even in select fire. 
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Give it a chance! It was a great read.
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I had a bout of brain diarrhea (and I’m an idiot) so sorry for the sarcastic remark. I grew up in the 1980’s where the only place I ever saw the Uzi being used was in the hands of gangsters in crime shows like Miami Vice! (those might’ve been MAC-10’s but I digress) I can’t even believe an Israeli weapon like the Uzi was even an option in the GAF’s arsenal!
Sorry for your luck @Aginor but you deserved a better submachine gun.
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Don’t worry, I wasn’t offended.
And the Uzi was kinda fun to use, it had a certain coolness factor because it was was the most ‘gangster’ weapon in our inventory.
Oh and BTW I don’t exactly know why, but its recoil feels really weak IIRC. The stock is almost not needed, it can easily be shot without it.
…I still would have loved to shoot that MP5 instead. 
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Pretty easy to attach optics and stuff onto the MP5 as well I think. Uzi? Maybe not.
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I’ve found pretty much all 9mm subguns are pretty controlable. The MP-5K can be run rather effectively without the stock for example. The ability to fold up the Uzi into a package not much bigger than a 6" revolver if you took the magazine out was the primary reason it was used here in the US by various agencies including the secret service (this is back when 6" revolvers rode in a lot of police holsters). From there it was a race to ever smaller form factors for protective work.
H&K in typical germanic fashion felt the MP-5 was at the apex of design with no further modification. It took them several years after the Iranian Embassy siege put the MP-5 front and center with flashflights hose clamped on them to come up with light or optics mounts. However IWI never really offered any options with the Uzi, until about 2000, so it’s not like H&K was loosing in the marketing front by not offering their claw mount for 20 years.
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Right. I mean, optics weren’t really a thing then. Best you could hope for was some white nail polish on your front sight blade. And besides, the HK diopter sights were the pinnacle of intuitive, fast aiming: you put the circle in the circle and your target in the middle, how could you want more? 
(Until your eyes don’t work like they did when you were twenty, that is. 
)
Further thread digression
The MP5, I have to admit, is a poor optics host all around. Sure, the claw mount works, but they’re fairly expensive and then the optic is properly positioned for an ostrich, never mind the lack of cheek weld.
You can find lower profile mounts, but the problem is that even the lowest tend to the put the dot right in the middle of the front sight hood:
Some heretics cut theirs off with a hacksaw or continue the quest for a mount/optic combo that gives a good cowitness, but on mine I wound up just giving up and doing this:
Works well, no permanent heresies committed with an endmill, and in a pinch you can use the housing as a rear sight pretty well out to 50 yards.
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@Aginor’s posts about marksmanship badges makes me think of mine…
As a airforce crew chief mechanic, I was issued the Kpist m/45B 9mm submachinegun, very basic and not that different from the Uzi.
We had an exemption from the standard order of never leaving your gun unattended, when we were working on aircraft, and could just as well have been unarmed. But every Swedish soldier had to have gun training, so…
Anyway, I managed to shoot for the marksmanship medal.
The greatest distance we shot that thing at was 300m. You really had to point the muzzle upwards and lob your shots in 
Lots of fun though. We did the prize shooting at the end of gun basic training. A full day of shooting at the range… Standing, prone, laying and different ranges.
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And here I was proud that I could hit sillouettes at 200 yds with my MP5 with red dot… I can’t imagine making hits at 300m (meters! So like 330 yards!) with an open-sighted subgun. Awesome!
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I don’t remember the hit requirement at 300m and I’m pretty sure it was prone with support.
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